Higher education is Georgia's most important growth industry. -- Are its growth days numbered under Gov. Perdue?

Excerpts from Bill Shipp's weekly column:

Higher education is Georgia's most important growth industry. It produces more jobs, pumps more cash into communities and has greater prospects for continued expansion tan any other segment of our economy.

So why is state government determined to chill with crippling budget reductions this expanding sector's momentum?

The story of higher education in Georgia parallels the saga of a steadily improving state government that became more inclusive and responsive to the needs of a diverse and growing population.

By 2002, Georgia was home to the fourth largest statewide system of higher education.

[T]he half-century campaign to improve and extend Georgia's colleges and universities has succeeded, until now.

A new mindset has taken hold in the Gold Dome. Downsizing higher education appears to be the shortest and least painful route to achieving a balanced state budget.

We're talking here about a system that is turning out hundreds of thousands of residents who will earn greater compensation and pay more taxes – system that has almost no end in sight for possibility of growth. In the private sector, smart investors would be eager to expand an industry with such promise or at least not stand in the way of its natural ascendancy.

So why don't our state executives and legislators adopt a similar attitude toward higher education? Could it be that some would prefer going back to that less hustling, seemingly genteel old Georgia populated by permanent classes of haves and have-nots? A downgraded education system will go a long way toward returning us to an apparently cherished time of slow economic growth and limited opportunities.
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And less we forget, with Bill Shipp, what you see is what you get.

This is the same Bill Shipp who a week or so ago sent so many into orbit with his column that is in my 10-06-04 post. But the following paragraphs were part of that column:

Perdue . . . forced 73 school districts to increase local taxes by whacking the state's commitment to funding public school grades K-12.

Without any specific rationale, he has taken a meat axe to higher education. He has proposed cuts of more than $410 million to our colleges and universities and another $44 million to technical and adult education.

This governor, whom we did not know, acts like a barbarian within the gates, determined to destroy everything in sight. Layoffs and tuition increases are becoming the order of the day.

Education, once the holy grail of every modern Georgia governor, is suddenly little more than just another state organization awaiting the blade and the wrecking ball.